


It's a shallow little world

by lbmisscharlie



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M, Murder, Vigilantism, dark!Sherlock/dark!John, illegal autopsies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-16
Updated: 2011-08-16
Packaged: 2017-10-22 17:13:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/240464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for <a href="http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/6487.html?thread=31343447#t31343447">this</a> amazing prompt at the kinkmeme:<i> Sometimes Sherlock does crazy things because he is bored. Sometimes he does them because John is bored.</i> It all went a bit dark on me. Sherlock's never bored when he has someone else's life in his hands and John's hand never shakes when he cuts someone open.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's a shallow little world

It’s not his first, this bloody, flayed wreck of a man beneath his hands. Not the first he’d hunted down, doped up, cut open. Like the others, it (he. his body. it.) will be disposed of and he won’t look back.

++

Over and over he tried to quell the buzz of inactivity: the bright, hot, heavy rush of cocaine, the whirled exhilaration of a case, and the primal gratification of the wet, sticky slip-slide of skin on skin. **Bored. BORED.** The word reverberates in his mind; he had thought maybe now the crash wouldn’t be so hard. Thought (contemplated. envisaged. hoped.) the quelling touch of John’s hands would distract his mind between the puzzles, the cases, between the all-too-brief periods of white-hot incandescence. He wakes in John’s bed feeling lazy and sated but all too soon the edges of his mind roughen and he feels the buzz start up again.

He may have told himself he hoped John would save him but truth is he’d already picked out his next. John’s hands and tongue, his taut muscles and heavy arousal, pleasurable and pleasantly distracting though they were, have merely prolonged the need and now his body sings. Vibrates with the need for control, for dominion, for the heady rush of an irreversible, irreconcilable decision.

He chooses every piece carefully – the location, the method, the victim – cautiously randomized to avoid patterns. He avoids falling into the tempting trap of poetic justice (he can’t delude himself that this is justice in any form. They may deserve it but his actions are driven by nothing like righteousness); no sexual degradation for the rapists or ‘accidental’ overdoses for the murdering drug lords. He slices and strangles, drugs and drowns. He prefers a neat, clean death, savouring not the extended struggle but the moment the spark of life is extinguished. He cuts and observes; dead flesh giving up its secrets is not torture, it’s science. After the death (binge. killing. debauch.) he scrubs fastidiously, dumps the body in a sewer grate, knowing the underworld will take care of it. He returns to the flat and John asks him about his day and complains about his own. John is weary, both annoyed with and resigned to the necessity for locum work. He tells himself, Sherlock knows, that he helps people, but that doesn’t stop the dull throb of boredom.

Sherlock notices when John’s tremor starts up – the ends of long days at the surgery, tired of sniffly children and hypochondriac pensioners, the interminable stretches between cases, blog updated and story told – and when it’s gone. His hand doesn’t shake when staunching a wound in the dirty back alleys of London and never tremors when he’s holding his gun. When he saves a life and when he ends one John Watson never quavers.

++

It’s a test, at first. Lestrade has proclaimed John Sherlock’s moral compass but Sherlock knows better than most the flexibility of John’s morality. Senseless killing he condemns but murder is only one name for ending a life. War, defence, mercy, justice – reasons and motives all and most a part of John’s past. Bullets and bombs for queen and country, ending lives to save others, the quiet oblivion of pills and needles: each walks the tenuous line of the law and each offers the sense of action John craves with his every breath.

What Sherlock suggests (intimates. hints. insinuates.) has more than overt themes of premeditation. A case (old, years before John came along). The crime: the murder of a child. The evidence: scanty at best, circumstantial to a piece. The suspect: undoubtedly guilty and still walking free. If he just happens to frequent a certain pub and may on an off chance be there tonight, what of it? Vigilantism, perhaps, nominally. It’s the act that matters, though the motive enables.

John’s hesitation is less moral than pragmatic. He considers the practicalities: the fatal blow, the cleanup, the escape. When Sherlock explains his process (cloaked as a hypothetical) he sees in John’s eyes trust, danger, and excitement. They leave, purposefully determined.

Their mark stumbles out of the pub, drunken and loud. Five yards back they follow, strides matching and fists firm. Round a corner, into an alley, and the man is fumbling with his zipper, humming under his breath. Gloved hand at his mouth, knife at his throat and he feels little as his blood pours out. They drag him into a warehouse, already prepped and waiting, and Sherlock’s blood thrums with anticipation. The death is done – and how clean and precise – and now those hands, those doctor’s hands, trained and sure, will reveal the body’s mysteries. Sherlock imagines the blackened lungs, the hard-hit liver, the signs of a life roughly lived. He considers John’s hands, capable of relief and pleasure and death.

John’s hand, holding the scalpel, doesn’t shake.  


**Author's Note:**

> Title is from The Decemberists' [The Culling of the Fold](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrM-GJyiRjk)


End file.
